Books to Laugh with

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In 2001, the New Yorker treated faithful readers to Fierce Pajamas, a comprehensive survey of humor culled from the 75-year history of the magazine. When I heard about this, my well-honed cat-like reflexes snapped into action and, three years later, I bought the book. These short pieces, known as “casuals,” include parodies, absurdities and flights of fancy. They showcase the wit of some of the giants in American humor – from E.B. White, through S.J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman, on up to Steve Martin. And along the way, two of my favorites – Woody Allen and James Thurber.

As is often the case with anthologies, I wind up seeking out more complete works from specific writers. In this instance I was led back to my own bookshelves, to the dusty ‘A’ section in the top-left corner of my wall, for my small but complete trio of Woody Allen books. This necessitates the use of a stepladder because in addition to being obsessively organized – fiction alphabetized by author, then chronological within each. I won’t even get into what I do to my non-fiction – I’m also quite short and can’t actually reach the top shelf of anything in my apartment.

Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects collect Woody Allen’s written humor from the mid 60s through to the late 70s, in 5-year chunks. I think you can get them all in one volume now, but I’m quite partial to my pocket-sized second-hand paperbacks – perfect for explosive bursts of laughter on the subway. There’s hardly a page without some jaw-droppingly hysterical absurdist musing, non-sequitur, or parody of some philosophical tract or of a psychological case-study. Even a few one-act plays for good measure.

Getting Even contains “The Metterling Lists” – essentially a collection of Herr Metterling’s laundry lists, spun-out Woody-style into a psychological and biographical profile. And “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers” – a succession of correspondence-chess letters, each one more politely sarcastic and seethingly hostile than the last.

Without Feathers includes “God” – a now-classic one-act play in which an actor and a writer are on stage bemoaning the lack of an ending to their Greek play. “Audience members” join in the scenario and eventually the melee includes cameos by a wayward Blanche Dubois, and one Mr. Woody Allen, the Creator himself. Reality is turned on its head, then rolled up in a ball and shot through a hoop in this Pirandello-esque comedy.

Side Effects has “The Kugelmass Episode” – a hilarious story in which our hero, with the help of a magician, escapes his humdrum world and retreats into the lusty pages of Madame Bovary for a succession of romantic encounters with Emma, confounding Flaubert’s readers and scholars with the sudden presence of a balding 1970s New Yorker in Emma Bovary’s boudoir.

Fierce Pajamas also led me to the “Ts,” to my somewhat haphazard collection of James Thurber books. Many years ago, my good friend Doug Holland, always a step or two ahead of me, introduced me to the world of Thurber. Humorist, cartoonist, editor, James Thurber was a mainstay of the New Yorker for decades.

Out of the half-dozen books I have, my pick would be My Life and Hard Times, a humorous memoir written by Thurber in the 1930s, replete with illustrations by the author, looking back on his youth in turn-of-the-century Columbus. Deceptively gentle and low-key, his stories often build to a frenetic climax. A common theme is how misunderstanding leads to rumor leads to panic. Seems simple. Yet no one does it quite like him.

A few weeks ago, as I was thinking of what to say about Thurber, fortune shone as my fellow Millions-contributor Patrick posted a great piece about the Paris Review, and in particular “The DNA of Literature“, a treasure trove of archived interviews that you can read on their website. I’ve been exploring this site in the weeks since then, and one of the first things I came across was a great interview (pdf) from 1955 with James Thurber himself!

In it he speaks of his astounding memory and how he can juggle hundreds of details in his mind. And of how he never knows until he’s typing away exactly how his stories will develop. He talks about the “New Yorker style” of humor in which you take your initial gleeful idea, your hilarious impulse, and then rewrite it, playing it down. Thurber also reflects on Harold Ross, the great Editor of the New Yorker, an unread man with bloodhound instincts who demanded clarity of his writers, and, to a man, kept them from being sloppy. Thurber also talks about his wife, his sounding-board, who it seems prefaces everything she says to James with “Goddammit Thurber…”

Always writing, always crafting the perfect phrase, always keeping it concise and clear, Thurber was the consummate New Yorker humorist. His humor took over his body. So much so that when turning a phrase over in his head, his daughter grew so concerned with the look on his face that she asked her mother: “Is he sick?” to which Thurber’s wife reassured her: “No, he’s writing something.”

Andrew Saikali
is a writer in Toronto, Canada, and passes his days as a copy editor with The Globe and Mail. He spends his moments of leisure listening to music, reading, watching films and prowling the streets of Toronto, and he feels that he is long-overdue for a vacation so that he can do more of those things. At any given time, he is probably pining for distant shores and really should do more traveling and less pining.

“That eye with which any artist looks at life is really dumb in a lot of ways. Usually, students forget how people make a living, for instance. Well, that’s just my job -- to remind them that’s what literature is about, really, how people live. The blood of family and the living of money.”
--Grace PaleyGrace Paley’s death, in 2007, was a unique loss. Poet, polemicist, and unsurpassed short story master -- from her debut collection, The Little Disturbances of Man’ to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later The Same Day, she cast an unforgettably wise, sharp eye on human foibles, personal and political.
In the process, she paved a path for others to follow, even if no one could match her unique blend of urban wit, street smarts, and tensile sentences.
A new collection, A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry,’ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by the poet and painter Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley, Grace’s daughter, brings together work from the course of her career and provides a much-needed reminder of its importance.
There is much talk these days of “Resistance Literature’’ -- a way of hearkening back to the protest prose of the past in response to the current serio-comic catastrophe. Unfortunately, much of it is cant -- Facebook posts disguised as literary rebellion, angry outbursts where cool, committed heads are needed.
But Paley was the real deal.
Let’s start with the essays reprinted here, from her collection, Just As I Thought, since the power of the stories speaks for itself, radiantly.
“The Illegal Days’’ deals, matter-of-factly, with the author’ decision to have an abortion back in the ‘40s, when it was dangerous and illegal (a period, sadly, that we seem about to revisit).
“My abortion was a very clean and decent affair, but I didn’t know until I got there that it would be all right,’’ she writes.
The doctor’s office was in Manhattan, on West End Avenue…The nurse was there during the procedure. He didn’t give me an anesthetic. He said, ‘If you want it, I’ll give it to you, but it will be more safer and better if I don’t.’ It hurt, but it wasn’t that painful. So I don’t have anything traumatic to say about it. I was angry that I had to become a surreptitious person, and I was in danger, but the guy was very clean, and he was very good, and he was arrested within the next year. He went to jail.
She goes on: "I didn’t feel bad about the abortion. I didn’t have the feelings that people are always describing. I may have hidden some of those feelings, but having had a child at that time would have been so much worse for me.’’
Being Grace, she doesn’t sugarcoat things, either.
But I’ll be very truthful. I never liked the slogan, ‘Abortion on demand, and most of my friends hated it...It’s such a trivialization of the experience. It’s like ‘Toothpaste on demand.’ If somebody said there should be birth control on demand, I would say yes. That would make a lot of sense. If I ask for a diaphragm, if I ask for a condom, I should just get it right off the bat.
But an abortion…After all, it’s a surgical procedure and really a very serious thing to undertake. It’s not a small matter.
Similarly, in the midst of a full-throated denunciation of the first Gulf War, now seen, ironically, as a “good’’ conflict in the light of its disastrous sequel, she stops a woman passing out pamphlets at a Cooper Union peace rally to ask a question: “'How come you guys left out the fact that Iraq did go into Kuwait? How come?'” She said, 'That’s not really important.' 'I know what you mean,' I said, 'but it happens to be true.'"
What is true, as opposed to what people believe, or want to believe, about themselves and the world they live in, is Paley’s sweet spot, the reason that she made a mark from her earliest days, when she was encouraged at a New School class taught by W.H. Auden, incongruously enough, to “write in her own voice,’’ as a chronology included in this volume recounts.
Her work remains indelible.
“You know, I like your paragraphs better than your sentences,’’ an insensitive lover remarks, with casual cruelty, in "Listening," a story from Later The Same Day included in an earlier volume of her Collected Stories.
“My husband gave me a broom one Christmas,’’ she notes dryly, in “An Interest In Life,’’ from Little Disturbances. “This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.”
“The Loudest Voice’’ describes a young girl’s insistence, over her mother’s objections, in singing in a Christmas pageant at school. After seeing the day through, she reflects: “I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody. My talking family, cousins far away, passerbys, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest.”
In his eloquent and loving introduction to this volume, George Saunders makes the case for Paley as a "secular saint," an honor I think this Bronx girl may have flinched from. He also describes her, ingeniously, as a “thrilling postmodernist," in the Barthelmesque tradition; it’s endearing, but not convincing, and comes across as a justification of his own fictional method.
Nora Paley’s “Afterword’’ is more pointed, and accurate:
As her child I absorbed the global way my mother took in the day. She experienced time as a bathtub calibrated by stories however they were sensed. As a young kid I recognized her open water intelligence but there was always a shark swimming through it.

When is the right time to tell aspiring writers about their job prospects? In graduate school? Before they even apply to graduate school? Or sooner than that even—in their first creative writing class? Never? Let them Google it because it’s just too depressing otherwise?

1.
I walked into the gymnasium at the Hammond School in Columbia, S.C., to watch a boys’ high school basketball game and, an hour before tipoff, the bleachers on both sides of the court were nearly full. By the baseline, standing-room-only space was already being staked out. It wasn’t a playoff game, Hammond’s not a big school, and it’s not the best team in the state. Instead, the crowd was there because of a YouTube video.
When that video was taken, two months earlier, Hammond was playing in a local tournament when the team’s point guard, Seventh Woods, received an outlet pass near midcourt. He turned and took three dribbles. A step past the foul line, he jumped, cocking the ball in his right arm -- and sailing almost completely over an opponent who looked to be about six feet tall before hammering the ball through the rim. On YouTube the sound of the dunk is concussive, like a nail gun going off.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgwfdSN6olM&w=560&h=315]
It was a preposterous athletic moment -- the video was labeled “Dunk Of The Year,” and that might not be an exaggeration: It was ESPN’s #1 play of the day (ahead of a LeBron James evisceration of Ben McLemore) and it only added to Woods’s Internet fame. Earlier that year, HoopMixTape.com had posted a mashup of Woods’s highlights to YouTube that was viewed 5 million times within eight days, and is now up to 10 million views. Meanwhile, Woods is still a high-school sophomore -- just fifteen years old. When you see the mixtape, it’s obvious why people have been so compelled to watch it -- and watch it again, and again. “I have been doing this forever,” says Nils Wagner, who produced it. “I've never seen a kid that young jump and explode like that.”
But Woods’s weight as prep basketball’s premier Internet phenomenon -- and how dominant he looks in his highlights -- might give a false impression of his chances at future success. He is #14 on the Rivals 150 list of prospects from the high school class of 2016. That’s very good, of course, but over the last decade high school prospects who held the same ranking ended up with very different basketball fates: Some, like Keith Brumbaugh (class of 2005), washed out quietly; others, like Robert Swift (class of 2004) washed out spectacularly. Some, like Tony Wroten (2011) and Archie Goodwin (2012), became average players in the NBA; only one, Chris Paul (2003), became a bona fide star. In other words, it’s entirely possible Woods is at the height of his fame right now. I went to the Hammond School to see what that kind of uniquely modern sports celebrity felt like in person.
2.
Seventh Woods -- whose name refers to the seventh day of creation -- joined the Hammond Skyhawks in 2011 as an eighth grader. The year before that the Skyhawks had won only eight games, but by 2014 they were real contenders. The game I attended was Hammond’s last regular season contest of the year, against Cardinal Newman, a nearby Catholic high school that had ousted Hammond from the South Carolina Independent School Association playoffs the year before en route to a championship of its own. The two teams had played four days earlier on Cardinal Newman’s home court. Woods had scored 28 and Hammond had prevailed in overtime to run its record to 21-5.
I found Jeff Barnes, a boyish former University of South Carolina football player and now the school’s athletic director, leaning against the wall behind the baseline. We talked as the girls’ varsity game thundered up and down the floor beside us. Barnes said there’d been a march of recruiters through Hammond over the last two years. Steve Wojciechowski from Duke has been by, as have coaches from Wake Forest, Ohio State, Baylor, and Clemson. That night, there were rumors (never confirmed) that former University of South Carolina head coach Eddie Fogler was in the building. The heaviest pursuit, though, has come from the University of North Carolina -- Roy Williams has taken in several games.
Woods’s arrival coincided with the attraction of other local basketball talent. One recent addition to the school’s team is Xavier McDaniel, Jr., a wiry junior whose father, known as X-Man, logged a solid NBA career in the 1980s and '90s. (Woods and McDaniel had known each other for years, but Barnes told me that, while two other players on the Hammond team came to the school specifically because of Woods, there was no direct connection between Woods’s presence and McDaniel’s enrollment.) I found X-Man sitting in the first row of the bleachers with his long legs stretched out in front of him. He had the bulk of an athlete whose playing days were behind him, and wore jeans and an untucked maroon polo shirt.
I introduced myself, and mentioned that as a kid growing up in Maine, I’d been excited when he’d joined the Celtics at the end of his career. Somewhat out of nowhere, as though it were the kind of thing that was always in the back of his mind, McDaniel brought up Reggie Lewis, and how sad it had been when the Celtics star had dropped dead on a practice court in 1993.
McDaniel said his son and Woods had been playing together since they were “six or seven,” and as we were talking, Woods walked by dressed in gray warmups. McDaniel waved him over. “I was just saying you were 10 when you dunked for the first time” McDaniel said.
Woods smiled. “Eleven,” he said. I introduced myself, we shook hands, and I told Woods I was looking forward to seeing him play that night. Woods is known as a quiet teammate, a lead-by-example kind of player. If he said anything in reply, it was softly, then he walked off toward the locker room. He had the unmistakable gait of a superior athlete -- the loose-limbed, languid coordination of something powerful before it’s been turned on.
I asked McDaniel if Mark McClam, the head coach, was around, and he pointed across the gym to a man with a neat coif of silver hair and a sharp tie. As I approached McClam, whose day job is selling medical devices, he was working hard on a piece of gum and chatting with two well-dressed older men. They shared a joke about how the concession stand that night was stocked with cold beer and single malt.
McClam and I talked about Woods. He said he thought Woods needed to improve the “cerebral” side of his game -- things like managing the clock in tight games. We talked about where Woods might sign in two years and he said Woods and his family were keeping that close, but then let on that Duke and UNC were the frontrunners. Then, as the girls’ game entered the fourth quarter, it was time to go, and McLam tossed his gum into a trash can and ducked back into the locker room to get ready for the game.
3.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If7Hrcf04Dw&w=560&h=315]
Hammond does starting lineups like an NBA team, with pulsing music, the lights down, and an announcer who calls each player’s name like he’s introducing a gladiator. The whole thing can be hokey even in an NBA arena, let alone on a Tuesday night at a small South Carolina private school.
Woods was introduced last. He wore #23, and beneath his jersey he had on a Superman compression shirt -- the product of a three-year sponsorship agreement Hammond had signed with Under Armour soon after the HoopMixTape went viral. On a stage behind the baseline, the Hammond student section, which featured one kid in a plaid bathrobe, another in a lime-green blazer, and a third wearing a football helmet, went crazy.
The game tipped off and Woods’s place in it became clear quickly. Hammond played zone and Woods hawked the perimeter passing lanes. His length and athleticism made it hard for the Cardinal Newman guards to swing the ball, and each time they tried, the crowd held its breath, anticipating a steal and a breakaway dunk. With less than a minute left in the first quarter, Woods delivered. He intercepted a pass by the far sideline, raced up the court, doubled-pumped with his right hand, and ripped the ball through the hoop as he flew by.
Despite that play, and another transition basket where Woods threw an alley-oop over his head to a streaking Xavier McDaniel Jr. for an easy layup, Cardinal Newman kept the game close. They got a few bruising baskets in the paint and several buckets from senior Charles Smith, who’d transferred to the school that fall, and had scored 32 points in Cardinal Newman’s previous loss to Hammond.
Like Hammond, Cardinal Newman played zone in the halfcourt, and Woods couldn’t do much against it. He seemed reluctant to take a jump shot -- a part of his game he’s said to be working on -- and the Cardinal Newman zone collapsed on him as soon as he started to drive. At halftime Hammond was up seven.
While we waited for the second half to start, I talked with a local reporter who’d covered a lot of Hammond games that year. He said he thought Woods became too passive at times -- that he’d assert himself with a play that no one else on the court could make, and then settle too easily back into just running the plays.
Hearing this, it struck me that Woods is in a tough position. His highlights suggest a fully developed player who’s arrived years ahead of his time. In reality, though, he’s an exceptionally athletic young teenager with a tremendous amount of basketball potential, a developing jumper, and a long way still to go. If he tries to dominate each game, he’ll be one of those me-first AAU kids who doesn’t realize that basketball is a team game. But, if he defers too much, critics will start questioning his heart. This is a dilemma that a lot of talented players face, of course -- but very few of them have ever faced it at this young an age.
Nils Wagner, who runs HoopMixTape.com, told me he hesitated before posting any Woods highlights online specifically because Woods was so young. “I don't like usually messing with kids who are 14, 15,” he says. “They're not always ready for that type of attention and exposure, you have to wait. But [Woods] had a lot of talent."
In late 2012, Wagner had first gotten wind of Woods when he heard rumors about a kid who’d dunked in a game when he was 11 years old. Woods was a freshman by the time the rumor got to Wagner, who searched online and found that there were only a handful of barely-viewed Woods highlights circulating.
"We had to keep Seventh a secret,” Wagner told me. “If anyone found out about him, everybody would have filmed him, and the mix wouldn't have been that big." So Wagner kept his mouth shut and dispatched his cousin, John Cookman, and a freelance videographer named Kyle Stanton to record every game of Woods’s 2012-2013 freshman season. From that footage they pulled fast-break dunks, weak-side blocks, acrobatic drives, and the occasional jump shot, stitched it all together to a hype soundtrack, and put it online. Within days the video had racked up those five million views; today it’s second most-viewed mix tape Wagner has ever made -- just behind a short clip of Michael Jordan Jr., dunking, and three million ahead of a mashup of John Wall highlights recorded when Wall was in high school at Word of God Christian Academy.
Wagner talked with Woods and his parents before going ahead with the mixtape, and he says they were excited about the project. Viral fame creates a lot of pressure and tremendous possibility for disappointment, but it also opens doors. “If I didn’t do that mix,” Wagner says, “[Hammond] wouldn’t have gotten that Under Armour sponsorship. They also got a national schedule, national events that fly out the whole team. The mix just gave them a lot more opportunities, put them on a national scale.”
4.
With 6:22 left in the third quarter, to the great delight of the small Cardinal Newman cheering section, Woods shot an airball from near the three-point line. But then a few possessions later he made a perfectly controlled upfake on the perimeter and, in a blur that confirmed everything I’d heard about him, took one dribble and dunked with two hands.
In the fourth quarter the score got tight and for a few minutes, the audience was reminded that watching a competitive game is more exciting than waiting for a single player to dunk. Cardinal Newman coach David Ross made a few savvy offense-defense substitutions, a short sharpshooter hit an outside jumper off the bench, and we had a one-possession game. The people around me leaned forward in their bleacher seats.
Then the spell broke. Xavier McDaniel Jr. curled into a pass at the elbow and knocked down a jumper. Woods knifed into the lane and hit a floating six-footer, which came so easily it made you think he could have been doing it all game had he wanted to. With the game slipping away, a Cardinal Newman player got called for foul on Woods out on the perimeter. Ross, who’d been on the officials all game, threw up his hands in exasperation. “One player and every referee in the state is afraid of him,” he yelled. And that was it. With less than 20 seconds left, Cardinal Newman fell back, the intensity in the gym deflated and, once again, watching Seventh Woods -- and examining his every action for what it might say about his future, whether as an NBA star or a coulda-been footnote -- became the most interesting story on the court.
With five seconds left Woods received a pass at halfcourt. There were no defenders between him and the hoop, and rather than run out the clock, he yielded to the temptation of his ability. A wave of anticipation went through the crowd. Woods dribbled casually down the court, took off a few feet from the hoop, and began to bring the ball around like a haymaker. But then he missed and the crowd let out its breath in disappointment.
As the ball clanged off the back of the rim and bounced back down the court, my throat seized for a moment, perhaps in empathy for this teenager who I’d barely even met. Was the missed dunk an omen? Or did it mean nothing at all?

In this week's New Yorker, Jill Lepore offers a bemused consideration (not available online) of the Library of America's new edition of John Smith's works. Collected fact, or collected fiction? she asks. In True Travels alone,Smith [claims] to have defeated armies, outwitted heathens, escaped pirates, hunted treasure, and wooed princesses - and all this on four continents, no less, if you count a little island in North America that this year celebrates its four-hundredth anniversary as the birthplace of the United States.Putting aside, for the time being, questions of veracity (not to mention morality - "outwitted heathens?"), the quadricentennial seems like a good time to touch upon the wonderful (and growing) body of fiction inspired by Captain Smith's exploits.John Barth'sThe Sot-Weed Factor is surely a leading exemplar of the subgenre - as well as being one of the finest novels of the 1960s. Into the hilarious and strangely affecting story of one Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Barth drops passages from Smith's "secret [read: invented] histories." Smith emerges as a liar and braggart of the first rank. But Cooke's intrepid tutor Henry Burlingame, undaunted, seems to model himself on the Captain. In the course of the novel, he "hunts treasure [and] wooes princesses," while bewildered Ebenezer blunders along in his wake. If you want a black comedy of high adventure (or if you want to see where Pynchon got the language for Mason & Dixon) look no further.In the 1990s, William T. Vollmann revisited the Jamestown story with Argall. Here, we get Barth's pastiche of colonial Queen's English filtered through Vollmann's distinctive authorial temperament. Like Barth, Vollmann is fascinated by the violence of the early English colonists and the slaughter endured by the American Indians (a fascination he indulges throughout his unfinished Seven Dreams series). Unlike his metafictionist predecessor, however, Vollmann blurs the lines between fiction and journalism, between fact and legend... Sound familiar?We'll pass over Disney's Pocahontas (IMDb) in silence, but Terence Malick's astonishing movie The New World (IMDb) certainly merits inclusion in the Jamestown canon. Malick takes a characteristically earnest approach to his subject. Even as his colonists descend into evil, Malick unabashedly evokes the romantic pull of the virgin land. He portrays the Powhatan tribe as innocents, much as the settlers did - but without the condescension that enabled so much slaughter. This movie is resolutely un-PC, and for that reason its condemnation of European conquest breaks through the familiar litany of post-colonial pieties. It is devastating, as any account of the origins of the U.S.A. should be.Now Matthew Sharpe, author of The Sleeping Father, has come along to toss his buckler into the ring. His new novel, published by Soft Skull, is called, simply Jamestown. I have not read it, but I can say that I like Sharpe's writing a lot. Here he reimagines the Jamestown colony as a postmodern battleground, pitting settlers who travel by bus against indigenous people unskilled in the use of sunscreen. This appears to be an "ahistorical fantasia," along the lines of Mark Binelli'sSacco and Vanzetti Must Die! or Chris Bachelder'sU.S.! It's notable that younger American writers are fleeing the good government of the historical novel in an era that has itself started to seem dystopic...that has, as Frederic Jameson puts it, forgotten how "to think the present historically." But Sharpe's choice of setting seems propitious. For as the Vollmann and Barth books show, there's nothing novel about these wild new novels. They're part of a grand tradition of American craziness that, Jill Lepore points out, stretches back to John Smith himself - "Who told his glorious deeds to many, / But never was believ'd of any."

I am not sure if my mother is crying from the beating, from loving him, or because of the broken oven that had survived a civil war but is now not likely to be replaced, and which, although we can’t know that yet, would never bake right again.